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Comment by mdavid626 | Hacker News Reader

Instead of putting Copilot everywhere, Microsoft could hire some proper devs and qa to avoid such problems, But no, MS employs vibe-coders only and fired the entire qa team.

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Cynical viewpoint: Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line? If the market is AI-everything, any resources that you devote to non-AI is a bad signal. Incentives are everything.

It's circular logic. The market is "AI everything" because they (and Google, OpenAI, and Facebook) are shoving it down people's throats so they can desperately try to recoup their investment in GPUs.

Because there being a stable desktop OS brings indirect profits and enables efforts like AI to work. AI isn't going to help you if you no longer have a computer to run it on.

This is my general concern with the decline of tech quality. It’s one thing if it’s just consumer products, but it’s now affecting actual tools people including us use to do their jobs.

Yeah. It's really important that you have a platform with your users, because that's how you introduce them to features (not always a bad thing). It becomes a touch point with your customers. Google and Apple have their phones, Meta is desperately trying to get their smart glasses working, Amazon is also desperately trying to get something together with Alexa, and Microsoft is... Throwing theirs away?

Oh I dunno. Maybe people should give a fuck about something other than making nothing but maximum profit. It's the core problem with our whole culture. Fuck you, make money. It's unethical trash.

Sure, but if your customers can't even use the AI products because your OS is dysfunctional, then you're still losing out.

> Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line?

Their entire ecosystem is built on top of Windows. It will only "not affect the bottom line" until it becomes bad enough that people has to abandon it with all the other MS products that depend on it.

Also, no LLM product is profitable right now. "The market is AI-everything" is complete and absolute bullshit.

Don't forget virtual participation trophies for "Windows Insiders" to act as unpaid QA as the replacement system.

It was nice in 2015-2017 when I got a free Windows 10 license for my Dell Ubuntu Linux Notebook (much cheaper to buy in Brazil). Back then most of the games only was on Windows. Nowadays I have a Lenovo with Windows 10/11 license but I do not used Windows since 2024.

I thought Nadella fired all the QA in favor of outsourcing to the different "rings" of beta users. Do they have any significant QA in house anymore?

The market isn't AI everything. Only 1.8% of office subscription holders think it's worth paying for copilot.

https://www.perspectives.plus/p/microsoft-365-copilot-commer...

The free Copilot chatbot stands at about 1%: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/01/09/is-microsoft-losing...

The stockmarket is AI everything and is more important. Investors can send the share price down far more easily than users can switch to another OS.

But it can also evaporate in an instant. An actual userbase doesn't.

That is why they do not worry about the userbase.

The share price might go down tomorrow and wipe out the value of management's options. The userbase cannot just do that.

Windows doesn't need QA. Why would it? The entire purpose of QA is to make sure your product has acceptable quality, so that you don't annoy customers and drive them to the competition. This isn't a problem for Microsoft: almost no one is going to stop using Windows, no matter how bad it gets. So why spend money on QA?

Microslop

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